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Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

Ansel Adams first saw Yosemite National Park in California at age fourteen in 1916, the same year he received his first camera, and his lifelong relationship with both Yosemite and photography is apparent in his c. 1937 masterpiece Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park. He knew every vantage point of Yosemite intimately, and knew how to wait with great patience and deliberation until the light brought out the utmost grandeur and majesty of the mountain ranges, rushing waterfalls, and clouds clearing over the valley. Adams is widely recognized as America's most eloquent photographic poet of the Western wilderness landscape. His passionate feeling for the land as mountaineer, photographer, and preservationist, and his consummate craftsmanship with camera and light were celebrated through the inspired gift of one hundred Adams photographs from Robert and Lorna Hauslohner on the occasion of the Museum's centennial in 1976. Martha Chahroudi, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 247.